St-Paul Castle Hill Anglican church


St-Paul Castle Hill screenshot (click to enlarge)


Summary of the case study

The St-Paul Anglican Parish of Castle Hill, Australia is a vibrant religious community which decided to have a dynamic website. They first hired a designer to create their website layout and later determined to implement it in TYPO3, realizing too late that some of the elements of their layout was too hard for them to integrate.

We were thus hired to integrate their website into TYPO3, creating some custom code for their graphical needs and tweaking HTML templates of several extensions.

 

Problems with the integration

  • Their graphical menu on the left of the flash headers cannot be resized due to a table layout,
  • they needed a front-page calendar event plugin integrated into their template,
  • none of the calendar extensions at the time were able to be displayed in their limited width
  • they needed a news front-end extension significantly different in behavior than the Mininews extension front-end plugin.

How we fixed their problems

Due to the limited budget for the project, two external php scripts were written for the left column (presentation of the calendar events and the Mininews event), and the calendar extension selected was directly modified to the needs of the client.

We prefer to write full extensions to accomplish such features, but the limited budget constraints forced us to be flexible.

As for the main menu, we decided after consulting the client to keep the menu in the HTML template without TYPO3 management.

In the end, the client got the website he wanted, at the budget he could afford.